Pragmatic is a term that describes an approach or decision based on real world conditions and circumstances rather than abstract ideals or principles. People who act pragmatically prioritize results and effectiveness over theoretical solutions or ideals. This type of approach can be seen in a variety of situations, including making business decisions and deciding on political actions or positions.
The defining features of Pragmatics are context-dependency and pragmatic intention. The former relates to how the meaning of an utterance is determined by the specific situation or circumstance in which it is spoken, while the latter refers to a speaker’s motivation or purpose in speaking. This distinction is important because it allows us to distinguish the semantics from the pragmatism of speech acts.
In practice, the boundaries between Semantics and Pragmatics are fuzzy. There is a large amount of overlap, and there are many different approaches to the topic. For example, some people define a semantic meaning for words that is independent of context; others see such a definition as a subset of pragmatics. There are also differing opinions about what pragmatics should cover. Some philosophers view it as a philosophical project, others treat it as a branch of linguistics, and still others look at the topic from an empirical perspective.
Most importantly, there are several different types of pragmatics: formal and computational; theoretical and applied; intercultural, interlinguistic and even neuropragmatics. This diversity reflects the different ways in which pragmatics has been approached by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and linguists.
Formal pragmatics is the most traditional approach to pragmatics, and it has a close relationship with semantics. It considers the implication of an utterance in a particular context, and it aims to give a precise description of that implication. There are two main theories of formal pragmatics: Speech Act Theory and Relevance Theories. Speech Act Theory examines Illocutionary Forces, while Relevance Theories tries to capture the process of comprehension on the part of a hearer of an utterance.
There is also a large amount of work done in computational pragmatics, which focuses on how computers can be made to understand human communication more effectively. This includes such things as reference resolution, which is how a computer determines when one object is similar to another. Computational pragmatics is often considered a subfield of artificial intelligence.
Other types of pragmatics are more concerned with the interaction between a speaker and a listener, or between an utterance and its intended audience. For example, some scholars have looked at the influence of gender on the form of an utterance in certain cultures, while others have studied the effect of sex on the meaning of words in English. There is also a lot of work being done in the area of cross-cultural pragmatics, which is the study of how different cultures use language. This field has a wide range of applications, from analyzing how the meanings of words change in different cultures to comparing how different cultures use politeness rules.
